New Virtual Universe

Even bigger than Second Life - the Chinese are involved in plans for a virtual mega-universe.

Second Life - TV Friday

There's a programme about money-making in Second Life onBBC2 at 7.p.m. tomorrow (Friday).
If you're not really sure what Second Life is about, take a look. I shall.

Irreppressible.Info

I've just installed a widget from Amnesty International - you can see it at the right.
Every time you log on to the blog it will give a fragment of information that some government or other has tried to censor on the Internet.
Click on the information fragment to find out more about it.

Censoring the Internet

Countries that censor the Internet:

Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma/Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.

Read more about it at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6665945.stm

Cyber War

Russians punish Estonia by overloading the computer system. The Russian government denies responsibility - but is this the future of warfare?

More problems in Second Life

This article suggests that the virtual world could provide a great opportunity for terrorists and money-launderers.

The article also says that

• Last year, Ailin Graef, a Chinese-born teacher living in Germany, claimed to have become the first person to make $1 million (£500,000) on Second Life. Her "avatar", Anshe Chung, amassed the fortune by developing virtual properties and selling or renting them to other "avatars".
• Google, the internet search company, is drawing up plans to compile psychological profiles of web users by monitoring how they play online games. The firm believes it can glean information about users' preferences and personalities by watching their online behaviour. The details could then be sold to advertisers.

Second Life

Here is the news article I mentioned.
Definitely very strange stuff.
This is a link to Second Life. They've got six million members, apparently, some of them with wings...

It's a place where people can act out their fantasy personas. The trouble is that some people's fantasy personas are not very nice.

World Press Freedom Day

Index on Censorship marks World Press Freedom Day with a reminder of journalists persecuted and murdered in various parts of the world.
Of the Internet it says:

Meanwhile, the hope for freedom offered by the World Wide Web seems to be lost.
Only a few years ago, we convinced ourselves that the web was the wild frontier, an ungoverned new world where everyone with access to a computer could write their own news, challenge official lines, and generally push ever harder at the barriers of censorship.

So what happened?

It seems increasingly obvious that that breach in the fence was only temporary. Throughout the world, the enforcers have caught up with the bloggers. We imagined the Internet to be beyond the reach of the censors. We were wrong. As George Orwell wrote in 1943, “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less.”

We now realise that this is just as true of the Internet user in 2007 as it was of the dissident diarist in 1943. In Egypt, blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman was jailed for criticising his country and Islam on his blog. Other Egyptian bloggers have quit, after harassment from security forces. Meanwhile, Iran and China both exercise extensive and ever-widening Internet censorship, with the help of companies such as Google. The Iranian government’s paranoia about the World Wide Web has now stretched to the point where sms messages may be screened, lest they be used for blogging. The Internet once offered the promise of a new ‘citizen journalism’ unburdened by commercial or institutional pressure. But now it increasingly finds itself under the insidious hand of the state censor.

Web 2.0 Good or Bad ?

Article
Interesting article in today's Observer.
Personally, I disagree with him.

Can the Internet be controlled?

China wants to censor the Internet:

BEIJING: Chinese President Hu Jintao launched a campaign to rid the country's sprawling internet of "unhealthy" content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine, state television reported.

With Hu presiding, the Communist Party Politburo – its 24-member inner council – discussed cleaning up the internet, state television reported. The meeting promised to place the often unruly medium more firmly under propaganda controls.

The full story is at:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4036816a4560.html

Does the Chinese government have any hope of succeeding
a) in the short term?
b) in the long term?

Or will the nature of the medium defeat the efforts of the controllers?

The Start of a Blog...

You found the blog. Well done!
The Internet is full of stuff that is relevant to Comms Studies.
On this blog we can alert each other to some of it.

For a start, here is the page on the exam board site from which you can download past question papers.

And here is an article about the Virginia Tech shooting that has some fairly standard things to say about MORAL PANICS, but has a useful list of examples you could introduce into an essay to back up your arguments.

This page gives some useful statistics about UK Internet usage.

More will follow.